Monday, August 28, 2006

Another MDP profile has been added to the Lego Mindstorms website. This time it is software engineer John Hansen.

You most likely know John Hansen for his work with BricxCC. A few years ago John took over lead development for the RcxCC project for the popular coding language Not Quite C or NQC for short. He rewrote the code and renamed the project BricxCC and in the process added support for all of Lego's programmable bricks. He also expanded the program's supported languages to include Mindscript, NQC, pbForth, BrickOS, and leJOS. Now even more recently John has taken over the project of developing the NQC language formerly maintained by Dave Baum.

John's newest project is working on the NeXT Byte Codes language. NBC is the first ever text based programming language for the Mindstorms NXT system. The advantages of using text based coding is that the programs can be 10 times smaller and 10 times faster. At this time NBC supports Win32, Mac, and Linux operating systems. The compiler is based on a command line interface which makes it compatible with the BricxCC program.